Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Russ Nelson's avatar

I agree about PowerPoint. I have very successfully given talks with a 3x5 card of notes, just to keep me on track and make sure I get to my points before the clock.

Expand full comment
Brett Stephens's avatar

Powerpoints fail when they are used to help the speaker organize the presentation instead of to help the audience understand the presentation.

Slides with lengthy text bullets are effectively speaking notes getting pasted into the slide. Same with the tedious outline slide some people insist on (first I'll talk about this, then I'll talk about that.) It's critical for the speaker to have such an outline, but the audience doesn't need it. I'll know what you're going to talk about when you start talking about it.

Same with the two minutes per slide heuristic. It's used to keep the speaker on time and on topic, the audience doesn't care. Sometimes it's good to breeze through a bunch at once others you can leave up for 5 minutes. Move when you need the info on the next slide, not when you want to shift gears to the next topic. In text documents you don't have some rule that says you have a figure every two pages, you just bring in the information when it's needed to support the claims in the text.

Expand full comment
33 more comments...

No posts